Squid Game: Unleashed is a fun game and a terrible adaptation

In Squid Game, schoolyard games are turned into nightmares, as players compete to survive and — if they’re lucky — earn a massive cash prize. But in Unleashed, a new mobile spinoff that’s part of the streamer’s fledgling gaming efforts, those games are fun. It’s a strange experience that sands off much of the appeal of Squid Game in service of making a multiplayer party game.

Unleashed is sort of like Fall Guys but in a Squid Game wrapper. You compete against 31 other players across three random games pulled from the show, like “red light, green light” or racing across a bridge made of glass. Slowly other players die off, and by the end one wins a whole bunch of money.

Aesthetically, the game mostly follows the show. There are a bunch of characters to play as — some pulled from the show, others new for the game — and even though there’s a cartoon aesthetic, things still get bloody, with players being shot for breaking the rules or crushed under some obstacle. There are the familiar green track suits and masked guards.

But the connections to the show are really only surface level. There’s no story element, so if you haven’t watched the show, you’d have no idea the kind of personal anguish many of the characters are going through.

In fact, many of the elements that make Unleashed a pretty fun mobile game are also what keep it from being a good adaptation of what Squid Game is all about. In order to reduce frustration, most of the games have respawning. So even if you fail at “red light, green light” and get shot by a guard, it’s not game over. It simply slows you down in a race to be one of a pre-determined number of players to cross the finish line and move on.

Similarly, the games can all be completed in a few minutes. This is great for playing short sessions on the go; being stuck in a 30 minute multiplayer match on your phone typically sucks. But when you put elements like the short run time and respawning together it, completely erases any of the tension that’s so core to Squid Game’s appeal.

And despite having no in-app purchases — Unleashed is completely free for Netflix subscribers and, for a limited time, non-subscribers — it’s still structured like a typical free-to-play game. You earn cash from winning matches and completing various goals, which is used to unlock new characters, costumes, and emotes. Every time I log on I’m greeted with a jarring number of pop-ups and notifications letting me know I just unlocked a zombie costume or that there’s a Christmas-themed event going on. Just this morning I was gifted a twerking emote.

Yes, now I can make Kang Sae-byeok, whose death was one of the most tragic moments of season 1, twerk in the middle of a deadly obstacle course.

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Unleashed isn’t a bad game. In many ways, it’s a clever reinterpretation of online party games for mobile. But, like most of Netflix’s expansions of the Squid Game universe, it also completely misses the point of the show. It’s sort of like what Fortnite is to the original movie Battle Royale: a playful, colorful take on a brutal, piercing story.

Fortnite largely avoided the tonal dissonance by creating a cartoon-ish, multiversal world that is far away from an island full of kids killing their classmates. Unleashed, on the other hand, is another part of Squid Game — one that doesn’t seem to understand why the series exists.